Thursday, October 10, 2013

Widespread Fraud In SSA Disability Program

Widespread fraud reported in Social Security Administration's Disability Program

A two-year investigation by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on
Investigations has found widespread fraud in the Social Security
Administration's (SSA) Disability Program. It appears that disability payments have skyrocketed because the SSA's attempt
to reduce
the back-log of disability cases has forced administrative law judges to hold hearings
without reviewing the medical evidence in the case files, decide cases
without holding hearings, and approve cases of claimants that are not
disabled.

The fraud is so rampant, and disability cases have so proliferated in
recent years, that the Social Security's Disability Trust Fund may run
out of money in only 18 months, says Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., whose
office undertook the investigation.
Coburn’s report on widespread fraud, released Monday, focuses in
large part on a veritable "disability claim factory" allegedly run by Attorney Eric C. Conn out of his small office in Stanville, Kentucky, a
region of the country where 10 to 15 percent of the population receives
disability payments.

(Judge David Daugherty)

The report documents how Attorney Conn allegedly worked together with Social Security
Administrative Law Judge David Daugherty (ALJ) and a team of favored
doctors with checkered pasts, including suspended licenses in other
states, who rubber stamped approval of disability claims. In most
cases, the claims had been prepared in advance with nearly identical
language by staffers in Conn's law office.
The report found that over the past six years, Attorney Conn allegedly paid
five doctors almost $2 million to provide favorable disability opinions
for his claimants.

In 2010, the last year for which records are available, Judge Daugherty
approved 1375 disability cases prepared by Attorney Conn's office and denied only
4 of them - an approval rate that other administrative law judges have
described as nearly impossible.
The average disability-benefit approval rate among all administrative
judges is about 60% of cases. But there are Daugherty equivalents
dotted across the country. In the first half of fiscal 2011, 27 judges
awarded benefits 95% of the time, not counting those who heard just a
handful of cases. More than 100 awarded benefits to 90% or more of
applicants, according to agency statistics.
Judge Daugherty, 75 years old, processed more cases than all but three
judges in the U.S. He had a wry view of his less-generous peers. “Some
of these judges act like it’s their own damn money we’re giving away,”
Mr. Daugherty told a fellow Huntington judge, Algernon Tinsley, who
worked in the same office until last year, Mr. Tinsley recalled.
Judge Daugherty was a standout in a judicial system that has lost its way,
say numerous current and former judges. Judges say their jobs can be
arduous, protecting the sometimes divergent interests of the applicant
and the taxpayer.
Some former judges and staff said one reason Judge Daugherty was allowed
to continue processing so many cases was because he single-handedly
helped the office hit its monthly goals. Staff members can win bonuses
and promotions if these goals are surpassed as part of performance
reviews.
Critics blame the Social Security Administration,
which oversees the disability program, charging that it is more
interested in clearing a giant backlog than ensuring deserving
candidates get benefits. Under pressure to meet monthly goals, some
judges decide cases without a hearing. Some rely on medical testimony
provided by the claimant’s attorney.
The report found, "Judge Daugherty telephoned the Conn law firm each
month and identified a list of Mr. Conn’s disability claimants to whom
the judge planned to award benefits. Judge Daugherty also indicated, for
each listed claimant, whether he needed a “physical” or “mental”
opinion from a medical professional indicating the claimant was
disabled."

Coburn's report found that, "over a four-year period from 2006 to
2010, the Social Security Administration paid Mr. Conn over $4.5 million
in attorney fees." And that, "Mr. Conn was the third highest paid
disability law firm in the country due to its receipt of over $3.9
million in attorney fees from the Social Security Administration."
The report says that when Senate staffers and the Social Security
Administration’s Office of the Inspector General began an investigation
based on tips from whistle blowers, Attorney Conn and Judge Daugherty began
communicating with disposable, pre-paid cell phones. It also alleges
they contracted with a local shredding company to destroy 13 tons of
documents. Attorney Conn also allegedly destroyed all the computer hard drives in
his office.
In 2011, the SSA placed Daugherty on administrative leave. He retired shortly after that.
Attorney Conn's legal fate is now in the hands of the Justice Department.The alleged fraud highlights an endemic problem in Social Security
disability benefit awards. The Coburn report says a random examination
of 300 case files by Congressional staff found more than a quarter of
the case files “failed to properly address insufficient, contradictory,
or incomplete evidence,” suggesting a high rate of fraud or abuse.
Disability payments have skyrocketed across the U.S. in recent years.
At the end of August 2013, more than 14 million Americans were
receiving disability benefits The Social Security Administration has
blamed aging baby boomers and the lingering effects of the recession as
two causes, but another reason disability payments have skyrocketed
appears to be the SSA's attempt to reduce
the back-log of disability cases has forced judges to hold hearings
without reviewing the medical evidence in the case file, decide cases
without holding hearings, and approve cases of claimants that are not
disabled.
That, in turn , has led to less scrutiny of individual case files, which can be hundreds of pages long.
Social Security Administration officials acknowledge they are trying to
clear a backlog of 730,000 cases. But they say they remain focused on
ensuring taxpayer money isn’t wasted. “We have an obligation to the
people in need to provide them their benefits if they qualify, but we
also have an obligation to the taxpayer not to give benefits to people
who don’t qualify,” said the former SSA Commissioner Michael Astrue.

LEXINGTON, Ky. (WKYT) An
eastern Kentucky attorney at the center of a national disability fraud
investigation is breaking his silence. Floyd County attorney Eric Conn
says "the truth will be forthcoming" and for others not to be so quick
to judge.

A congressional report accuses Conn of scheming with
retired administrative law Judge David B. Daugherty to approve more than
1,800 disability cases from 2006 to 2010.
"I have practiced Social Security disability law for twenty
years. I have advertised extensively and represented every claimant to
the best of my ability," wrote Conn in a statement sent to WKYT. "When
changes in the law occurred, I studied those changes in an effort to
better represent the people who put their faith in me. I have served my
clients with honor and dignity."
Before a senate hearing on Monday, October 7, 2013 Conn refused to
answer questions, a former worker claimed he called doctors
responsible for signing off on the reports "whore doctors" because they
didn't question the information.
Allegations in a more than 160-page report from a U.S.
Senate committee include that Conn "used his law practice to exploit key
vulnerabilities in a critical federal safety net program and became
wealthy in the process, "inappropriate collusion," and the "collaborated
on a scheme that enabled the judge to approve, in assembly-line
fashion, hundreds of clients for disability benefits using manufactured
medical evidence."
Attorney Conn - said to be the third highest paid disability lawyer
in the country - stood before a senate hearing Monday, October 7, where four
witnesses testified against him. He's accused of perpetrating massive
fraud against the Social Security Administration (SSA).
Daugherty is said to have awarded an unusually high number
of benefits totaling $ 2.5-billion while Conn would seek out doctors
with suspicious credentials.
"He called them whore doctors because you could get them to
do what you want and they were cheaper," said Melina Hicks who worked
for Conn.
The report claims these doctors would sign a claimant's form -- paving the way for Judge David Daugherty to award benefits. One in three of the cases reviewed revealed identical paperwork.
During this time, Conn received $4.5 million in lawyers fees paid by SSA.Jennifer Griffith and her co-worker Sarah Carver also
testified Monday. They processed disability claims in Huntington, West
Virginia.
In 2011, they filed a federal lawsuit against Conn and
Daugherty under the false claims act which allows whistle blowers to get
a portion of money recovered in fraud cases.
"With Judge Dougherty and Eric Conn, what I seen was 100
percent// if you look at that statistic alone, what's the likelihood
that every claimant who walks into your office is disabled," said Carver
who is a senior case technician for the SSA.
In a "60 Minutes" broadcast on Sunday, October 6, CBS News tracked down Conn.
When
reporter Steve Kroft asked Conn to talk about his relationship with the
former judge and his incredible success in disability court, Conn
didn't elaborate.
"Boy, that's tempting. Oh, I would love to comment on some
of that. But not - I'm really sorry, I don't think I should right now,"
Conn told CBS News.
At Monday's hearing, he remained even more restrained.
"I respectfully assert my constitutional right not to testify here today, sir," Attorney Conn told committee members.Judge Daugherty left the hearing before he was called to testify.
More than 11-million Americans receive disability insurance. That's up 20 percent in the last six years.
Sen. Tom Coburn who spear-headed the investigation says that this case is just one example of widespread abuse.
"Some in congress refuse to acknowledge that the disability
programs are broken and in dire need of significant oversight. People
who are truly disabled will pay the price of our dithering," said Sen.
Coburn.

Being disabled is often not the chief worry of DI applicants.
There is something particularly despicable about anybody who would game
the Social Security disability system, imperiling the program for
people who are genuinely in need of such assistance. But countless
people are doing just that. Heather Mac Donald—the Manhattan Institute’s
Cassandra—began sounding the alarm in 1995 with a groundbreaking City Journal article
about an able-bodied and hardworking family, which, alas, put its
impressive energies into obtaining DI payments instead of finding more
meaningful work. Since then, things have only gotten worse.
When it began, the disability insurance (DI) program was small and
inexpensive. Applicants were vetted and the able-bodied turned away. The
number of people on DI in 1960 was around 455,000; by 2011, the number
had skyrocketed to 8,600,000. The budget for DI is $135 billion a year,
topping the costs of the departments of Homeland Security, Justice, and
Labor combined.
Even this figure is misleading: after two years on DI, the recipient is
eligible for Medicare, regardless of age, adding immensely to the
taxpayer’s burden. DI benefits are not lavish, amounting to around
$1,100 a month. This often adds up, however, to lifetime benefits of
around $300,000. Disability lawyers, on the other hand, can pull down
princely sums. Dare I say they make out like bandits?
Senator Coburn's report, jointly released Oct. 7 by the Senate’s
Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committees, and featured last
Sunday on "60 Minutes," shows how legal and medical personnel are
exploiting the system and in the process creating a national disaster.
Government reports can make for pretty dull reading. But this one is a
page turner. Not since the Starr Report, which dealt with shenanigans in
the Clinton White House, have I found myself unable to put down a
government document. And this report is far more important than the
Starr Report, dealing, as it does, with a costly and widespread form of
moral rot.
The star of the report is Eric Conn, who, according to the report, has
built the largest and most lucrative disability practice in the country.
Conn, whose office is in Stanville, Kentucky, on the West Virginia
border, was also the subject of a Wall Street Journal expose. For a
disability lawyer, winning is everything. They only get paid of their
client wins. Then they are paid by the government, which deducts the
fees from what the client receives.
The system has worked well for Conn. “At the height of his success in
2010, Mr. Conn employed nearly 40 people and obtained more than $3.9
million in legal fees from [the Social Security Administration], making
him the agency’s third highest paid disability lawyer that year,” the
Coburn report notes.
It hasn’t hurt that most of Conn’s cases were heard by Administrative
Law Judge David Daugherty, in the SSA’s regional Huntington, West
Virginia Office of Disability Adjudication and Review. In 2010, Judge
Daugherty, who is currently on administrative leave, ruled against only
four of the 1,284 cases he heard. This record is all the more
astonishing when one realizes that these were cases that had previously
been turned down and were on appeal. Daugherty reportedly okayed around
$25 billion in DI benefits in his last years as an administrative law
judge.
No wonder the judge and lawyer reportedly took pains to work together.
According to the Coburn report, "Judge Daugherty telephoned the Conn law
firm each month and identified a list of Mr. Conn’s disability
claimants to whom the judge planned to award benefits. Judge Daugherty
also indicated, for each listed claimant, whether he needed a ‘physical’
or ‘mental’ opinion from a medical professional indicating the claimant
was disabled."
Conn also seems to have had favorite doctors, some of whom have suspect
credentials, including a history of malpractice payouts, but
nevertheless were paid substantial fees to fill out DI forms. According
to the report, a review of records found that over the past six years
Conn paid five doctors almost $2 million for paper work on disability
clients. (He contracted these fees with claimants.)
And the medical work wasn’t that demanding. The Conn firm reportedly
supplied doctors with a set of five different pre-filled out forms for
hundreds of clients. Some doctors met clients at the “medical suite” in
Conn’s law offices. Fifteen minutes was a normal visit. This meant that a
single doctor could see up to 35 claimants in a day. An indication
about how widespread this abuse is: a businessman in my hometown
ruefully told me that there is a local doctor widely known as the go-to
man for DI benefits, even (or especially) if you are in the pink of
health.
Although Coburn made it abundantly clear on “60 Minutes” that he
doesn’t begrudge DI payments to the genuinely disabled, the senator, who
is also a physician, was lambasted for being anti-sick person. “The
news program's theme was that disability recipients are ripping off the
taxpayer,” charged Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times,
a Pulitzer Prize winner, no less, in a story describing the “shameful
attack on the disabled.” Did Mr. Hiltzik really see “60 Minutes?” Coburn
was critical of the non-disabled who, with help from lawyers, doctors, and judges, are ripping off the system.
Coburn acknowledged that many able-bodied DI claimants are desperate
because the economy is so bad that they can’t find work. Nevertheless,
DI wasn’t set up to deal with the outcomes of a bad economy but to help
keep people who truly can’t work. Can DI be saved for those who really
need it? There are some fixes: a healthy skepticism about the cases
claimants present and the presence of a representative of the Social
Security Administration—or better still, a taxpayer’s advocate—at DI
hearings would be a start.
The reason fraud escapes detection, the report indicates, is that
judges face tremendous pressure to get through the backlog of DI
applicants. Before you suggest hiring more judges, let me propose a
simpler fix: if only the truly disabled got DI, if the fakes were turned
away, the lines of people applying would be shorter. Our friend with
the cowboy hat is involved in DI law because it’s a gold mine. It
shouldn’t be. It was designed for the disabled, not for lawyers and
shady doctors.
Of course, if there is a move to institute such changes, there will be
an outcry. The Michael Hiltziks will accuse reformers of hating the
disabled, and the public will be swayed. Or will it be? We may be
reaching a point where the taxpayer is sick and tired of being ripped
off—and the majority of Americans are appalled when our government
offers citizens inducements to give up on work and cheat through an
ill-supervised program that ends up helping lawyers and doctors, rather
than the disabled.

Nov. 02, 2013

HUNTINGTON -- An investigation into the Huntington Office of
Disability and Adjudication Review was launched after the publication
of a Wall Street Journal article in 2011 outlining the relationship
between disability lawyer Eric C. Conn and Administrative Law Judge(ALJ)
David Daugherty.

Conn ordered a massive destruction of files
at his office, according to a report from the Committee on Homeland
Security and Governmental Affairs and testimony at a Congressional
hearing last month.
ALJ Daugherty, then 75 years old, called
Conn's firm multiple times in the days after the article appeared, but
Conn refused to talk to the judge on his law firm's phone lines, the
Congressional report found.
The report states the judge left a message on Conn's home phone that said: "OK.
There are those of us who know the D.A. There are those of us who know
the circuit judge. There are those of us who have an inside track and
hear some things. We need to talk. If you don't want to, it's your loss.
You need to contact me ... You need to do it. There are things you need
to know. Good-bye."
After that, the report alleges, ALJ Daugherty
and Conn communicated through the use of disposable prepaid cell phones
so the calls couldn't be tracked.
ALJ Daugherty was placed on
administrative leave pending investigation and retired in 2011. Judge
Charlie Andrus also stepped down as chief justice of the Huntington
office, though he continued to serve as a judge until being placed on
leave pending an investigation and retiring this year. ALJ Debra
Bice, chief administrative law judge (Chief ALJ) for the entire Office of Disability
and Adjudication Review under the Social Security Administration (SSA/ODAR), told a
colleague that when she questioned Andrus on ALJ Daugherty, "he couldn't
give an honest assessment of what was going on."
While Andrus
testified before a Senate committee investigating Social Security fraud
earlier this month, Conn exercised his 5th Amendment right not to
testify on evidence that might incriminate himself.
Despite receiving a federal subpoena, ALJ Daugherty did not show up for the hearing.
Huntington
office workers Sarah Carver and Jennifer Griffith gave detailed
testimony on the dysfunction of their workplace, and two of Eric Conn's
former employees also testified.
"Those women, the ones who
spoke out, they are extremely brave and deserve a lot of credit," said
ALJ Daniel Kemper, a former judge and colleague of ALJ Daugherty in the
Huntington office.
Shortly after the Congressional hearings,
Barboursville Police, responding to a call of what the department called
a possible suicide attempt, found ALJ Daughertypassed out in a car with a
garden hose duct-taped to the exhaust pipe and running into the vehicle.
An empty bottle of liquor and an empty pill bottle were also found,
according to police. ALJ Daugherty was revived and spent an unknown number of days at an area hospital before being released.
Just how Huntington Administrative Law Judge David "D.B." Daugherty
managed to be one of the most productive Social Security Administration
judges in the country in the later years of his career was something of a
mystery to his co-workers and fellow judges.
ALJ Daugherty, who became an administrative law judge in 1990, was hardly
ever in his office and rarely conducted hearings, according to a report
issued by the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and
Governmental Affairs last month after it looked into possible abuses in
the Huntington Social Security office.
The report and recent Congressional testimony allege ALJ Daugherty abused
an initiative by the Social Security Administration urging judges to
decide between 500 to 700 cases per year to clear some of the system's
backlog.
Daugherty well exceeded those marks, moving thousands of disability
claims per year, almost all of which he approved by simply looking at a
file and making a decision while rarely conducting hearings. When those
hearings were conducted, it was at a break-neck pace.
When a fellow judge expressed concern over moving cases quickly,
Judge Daugherty told him "You're just going to have to learn what corners to
cut," according to the report.
The document indicates Judge Daugherty engaged in this behavior for years
even before the 2007 initiative, and perhaps made himself indispensable
because he exceeded numeric goals and helped put the Huntington Office
of Disability and Adjudication Review among the most productive offices
in the country.
But the volume of cases didn't match what colleagues observed of the judge's work ethic.
The report states one administrative law judge in an email called
Daugherty "intellectually lazy," and that was "probably his most obvious
trait."
Another colleague said Daugherty was "A spoiled little boy who became a judge" who "sought the easiest way out" in his work.
The 266-page congressional investigative report, Congressional
testimony and media reports allege Daugherty worked with Kentucky
disability attorney Eric C. Conn to abuse the Social Security
Administration by awarding unearned disability benefits to so many
clients that Conn became the third-highest-earning disability attorney
in the United States at one point.
The report also reveals that Judge Daugherty approved benefits in thousands of other cases that had no connection to Conn.
Decisions made by Daugherty from 2005 through 2011 to award disability
benefits to claimants cost Social Security more than $2.5 billion,
according to the report. His 99.7 approval rating over a two-year
monitored period was well above the national average of 60 percent.

In 2010, Judge Daugherty was the third-most productive ALJ judge out of 1,500
judges nationwide, deciding 1,411 cases. Of those, 530, or roughly 37
percent, were claimants represented by Conn. Daugherty awarded benefits
in 1,410 of the cases. He denied benefits only once.

The report states it was a running joke in the Huntington Office of
Disability and Adjudication Review that if someone was looking for Judge
Daugherty, "you should not look in his office."
Various fellow judges and even some office personnel brought it to the
attention of management numerous times that Judge Daugherty would sign in,
disappear for the day, then return and sign out as if he had worked
eight hours. Sometimes he even gave himself extra hours worked. The
judges do not receive extra pay for overtime, but can earn extra leave.
The report states that Daugherty's behavior when it came to time and
attendance was "a constant source of tension" in the Huntington office.
One of Daugherty's critics in that regard was fellow judge ALJ Daniel Kemper.
"It was extremely frustrating," the now-retired Kemper said in an
interview with The Herald-Dispatch recently. "It's one of the reasons
that I left."Kemper and Daugherty were sworn in together in 1990, and assigned to
the Huntington office. Kemper said he spent three weeks in training with
Daugherty, who had previously been a circuit judge in Cabell County
from 1977 through 1984.
Kemper and other justices issued complaints to Huntington Office Chief
Justice (HOCALJ) Charlie Andrus multiple times over a period of years regarding
the attendance and sign-in issues, but Daugherty was never disciplined.
The report states that Andrus tried on several occasions to kick the
complaints up to his superiors, who told the justice it was his
responsibility to manage such an issue, with one official saying, "I
think Judge Andrus wants someone else to do his job."
Kemper contended in the congressional report that Daugherty was never disciplined because he moved a high volume of cases.
Former fellow judge William Gitlow wrote to a colleague: "We have Judge
Daugherty here who scans the master docket each month, pays 90+% of the
time and gets out 80 to 100 cases a month. So we make our numbers each
month. Without him we would not. Ever."
Documents also show that in the case of another Huntington judge who
only decided about 20 cases per month, HOCALJ Andrus moved quickly to conduct a
thorough investigation of alleged time card abuse.
After a Wall Street Journal article about Daugherty's relationship with
Conn was published in May 2011, Kemper, who retired in 2007, said he
was floored by statements Daugherty made to local media.Daugherty said in those interviews that he moved a lot of cases because
he loved his job and applied himself to the task of relieving a backlog
of cases.
"He was claiming he got all these cases because he was such a hard
worker," Kemper said. "... His contention that he worked so hard could
be refuted just by his time and attendance records."
Kemper said he had no idea where Daugherty went every day.
" ... there was nothing I had seen," Kemper said. "I didn't go so far as to make an individual effort to follow him around."Enter Eric Conn
The committee report indicates that Daugherty didn't work hard, but fast.
He decided most of his cases "on the record," meaning he didn't conduct
a hearing with the claimant, but awarded benefits just by looking at
the case file.
In relation to Conn, since at least 2006, Daugherty would call the
attorney's office and read off a list of names and Social Security
numbers of Conn's clients who were on the judge's docket, referred to as
the "DB list," and tell Conn or his office employees what type of
medical evidence he needed to approve the case, investigators found.Conn would then take disability forms that were already filled out to
doctors to sign. Conn allegedly paid local physicians he referred to as
"whore doctors" anywhere from $300 to $650 per form, according to
Congressional testimony and the committee report.Daugherty would then write favorable decisions for the client, using
variations on the same language in nearly every case, the report states.
It also said Daugherty would have Conn change the onset date of a
condition so that records of previous denials wouldn't factor in because
the judge would be supposedly looking at a new medical diagnosis.
Many of those cases were moved onto Daugherty's docket by the judge
himself, according to the report and testimony. Andrus was bombarded by
complaints from other judges and docket clerks that Daugherty was taking
cases that hadn't been assigned yet, or, in some cases, had already
been assigned to other judges.
Andrus would promise to discuss the issue with Daugherty, but the judge was never disciplined, according to the report.
Daugherty was questioned about his relationship with Conn as early as
2002, but deflected any criticism back on Andrus, alleging the chief
judge had an inappropriate social relationship with the attorney.
Andrus admitted he had met once with Conn for a meal, and had gone to a
movie with the attorney. He also said Conn offered him
all-expenses-paid trips to Brazil and Russia, which Andrus said he
flatly turned down due to conflict-of-interest issues.
At times, Daugherty made some rather striking allegations about his superior.
In replying to questions from a higher judge about his social
relationship with Conn, Andrus said "This is exactly what I was talking
about when dealing with Judge Daugherty. At least this time he did not
accuse me of doing cocaine in my office."Daugherty's hearings
When judge Daugherty did conduct hearings, they were done inassembly-line fashion, according to his fellow judges.
Daugherty would review Conn's cases in the Huntington office's
Prestonsburg, Ky., satellite office, which was close to Conn's legal
practice.
"I would be with (Daugherty) in Prestonsburg, and you would see Eric
Conn bring in these scores of people at one time," Kemper said.
"(Daugherty) would finish 20 cases in the time it took me to do two or
three."
According to the report, Daugherty would conduct hearings in 15-minute
increments, while a single hearing for another judge would take 45
minutes to an hour.
But in most of the cases involving Conn's clients, Daugherty opted for
making "on the record" decisions based on case files and negating the
need for hearings.
According to the congressional report, Daugherty conducted 80 hearings
for 481 of Conn's clients he approved for benefits in 2006. Those
hearings were conducted over a span of four days.
In 2007, Daugherty saw only four of 509 clients he handled for Conn,
with all of the hearings conducted in one day. He didn't conduct
hearings for any of Conn's 429 clients he approved for benefits in 2008.
In 2009 and 2010, he saw a total of five of Conn's 981 clients who were
granted benefits. In 2011, before his suspension, Daugherty saw 18 of
366 clients he approved for Conn, all in one day.
In one instance in 2002, Daugherty canceled a Prestonsburg docket of 30
cases and granted all the claimants benefits using the on-the-record
method of case review. However, several court employees needed for the
hearings had already been scheduled and paid to be at the Prestonsburg
office.
That prompted Andrus to send out a memo to the entire Huntington office
asking all cancelations be cleared through him. Regional Chief Justice
at the time, Judge Frank Cristaudo, who operated out of the Philadelphia
office, wrote a memo requesting that Daugherty be officially
reprimanded.
"To state that 30 hearings were canceled and 30 on-the-record decisions
issued to help the agency meet performance goals suggests possible
impropriety and flawed decisions," Cristaudo wrote.Cristaudo had drafted a reprimand and agency leaders met in December
2002 to decide if Daugherty should be disciplined. According to the
report, the letter was never sent due to agency concerns regarding
judicial independence.
That phrase -- "judicial independence" -- was one that Andrus would use
time and again while being grilled by a U.S. Senate panel last month on
why Daugherty was never disciplined.
According to the report, Andrus did note that Conn would frequently cancel hearings if the case wasn't on Daugherty's docket.
He said he confronted Conn directly about this, and Conn remarked "Well, it was good while it lasted."
According to the report, Daugherty continued to move Conn's cases to
his docket until the Wall Street Journal article was published. That's
when Andrus put a strict lockdown on moving cases and even put a stop to
a custom schedule the chief judge had designed that made sure Conn's
cases were heard before any others.
Daugherty did not attend a Congressional hearing on SSA fraud despite a subpoena from the federal government.
Daugherty said he explained his absence in an email through his
attorney to the committee, but did not reveal its contents to The
Herald-Dispatch.

(Fields, Ben; West-Va Hearld-Dispatch)

Our Severely Disabled Disability System

Charlotte Hays

One of the questions I pose in my forthcoming book When Did White Trash Become the New Normal? is this: Should I limp when I’m at the disability office?
At the risk of sounding flip about something with deeply serious
implications for our nation, I must say that Senator Tom Coburn’s
investigation of fraud and abuse in the Social Security Administration's
Disability program definitively answers my question: Don’t bother. Just
find the right lawyer.
That’s no problem as disability lawyers advertise constantly on TV. My
own personal favorite is Charles Binder, the guy with the cowboy hat and
the soothing sign-off: “We'll deal with the government. You have enough to worry about.”
Being disabled is often not the chief worry of DI applicants.
There is something particularly despicable about anybody who would game
the Social Security disability system, imperiling the program for
people who are genuinely in need of such assistance. But countless
people are doing just that. Heather Mac Donald—the Manhattan Institute’s
Cassandra—began sounding the alarm in 1995 with a groundbreaking City Journal article
about an able-bodied and hardworking family, which, alas, put its
impressive energies into obtaining DI payments instead of finding more
meaningful work. Since then, things have only gotten worse.
When it began, the disability insurance (DI) program was small and
inexpensive. Applicants were vetted and the able-bodied turned away. The
number of people on DI in 1960 was around 455,000; by 2011, the number
had skyrocketed to 8,600,000. The budget for DI is $135 billion a year,
topping the costs of the departments of Homeland Security, Justice, and
Labor combined.
Even this figure is misleading: after two years on DI, the recipient is
eligible for Medicare, regardless of age, adding immensely to the
taxpayer’s burden. DI benefits are not lavish, amounting to around
$1,100 a month. This often adds up, however, to lifetime benefits of
around $300,000. Disability lawyers, on the other hand, can pull down
princely sums. Dare I say they make out like bandits?
Senator Coburn's report, jointly released Oct. 7 by the Senate’s
Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committees, and featured last
Sunday on "60 Minutes," shows how legal and medical personnel are
exploiting the system and in the process creating a national disaster.
Government reports can make for pretty dull reading. But this one is a
page turner. Not since the Starr Report, which dealt with shenanigans in
the Clinton White House, have I found myself unable to put down a
government document. And this report is far more important than the
Starr Report, dealing, as it does, with a costly and widespread form of
moral rot.
The star of the report is Eric Conn, who, according to the report, has
built the largest and most lucrative disability practice in the country.
Conn, whose office is in Stanville, Kentucky, on the West Virginia
border, was also the subject of a Wall Street Journal expose. For a
disability lawyer, winning is everything. They only get paid of their
client wins. Then they are paid by the government, which deducts the
fees from what the client receives.
The system has worked well for Conn. “At the height of his success in
2010, Mr. Conn employed nearly 40 people and obtained more than $3.9
million in legal fees from [the Social Security Administration], making
him the agency’s third highest paid disability lawyer that year,” the
Coburn report notes.
It hasn’t hurt that most of Conn’s cases were heard by Administrative
Law Judge David Daugherty, in the SSA’s regional Huntington, West
Virginia Office of Disability Adjudication and Review. In 2010, Judge
Daugherty, who is currently on administrative leave, ruled against only
four of the 1,284 cases he heard. This record is all the more
astonishing when one realizes that these were cases that had previously
been turned down and were on appeal. Daugherty reportedly okayed around
$25 billion in DI benefits in his last years as an administrative law
judge.
No wonder the judge and lawyer reportedly took pains to work together.
According to the Coburn report, "Judge Daugherty telephoned the Conn law
firm each month and identified a list of Mr. Conn’s disability
claimants to whom the judge planned to award benefits. Judge Daugherty
also indicated, for each listed claimant, whether he needed a ‘physical’
or ‘mental’ opinion from a medical professional indicating the claimant
was disabled."
Conn also seems to have had favorite doctors, some of whom have suspect
credentials, including a history of malpractice payouts, but
nevertheless were paid substantial fees to fill out DI forms. According
to the report, a review of records found that over the past six years
Conn paid five doctors almost $2 million for paper work on disability
clients. (He contracted these fees with claimants.)
And the medical work wasn’t that demanding. The Conn firm reportedly
supplied doctors with a set of five different pre-filled out forms for
hundreds of clients. Some doctors met clients at the “medical suite” in
Conn’s law offices. Fifteen minutes was a normal visit. This meant that a
single doctor could see up to 35 claimants in a day. An indication
about how widespread this abuse is: a businessman in my hometown
ruefully told me that there is a local doctor widely known as the go-to
man for DI benefits, even (or especially) if you are in the pink of
health.
Although Coburn made it abundantly clear on “60 Minutes” that he
doesn’t begrudge DI payments to the genuinely disabled, the senator, who
is also a physician, was lambasted for being anti-sick person. “The
news program's theme was that disability recipients are ripping off the
taxpayer,” charged Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times,
a Pulitzer Prize winner, no less, in a story describing the “shameful
attack on the disabled.” Did Mr. Hiltzik really see “60 Minutes?” Coburn
was critical of the non-disabled who, with help from lawyers, doctors, and judges, are ripping off the system.
Coburn acknowledged that many able-bodied DI claimants are desperate
because the economy is so bad that they can’t find work. Nevertheless,
DI wasn’t set up to deal with the outcomes of a bad economy but to help
keep people who truly can’t work. Can DI be saved for those who really
need it? There are some fixes: a healthy skepticism about the cases
claimants present and the presence of a representative of the Social
Security Administration—or better still, a taxpayer’s advocate—at DI
hearings would be a start.
The reason fraud escapes detection, the report indicates, is that
judges face tremendous pressure to get through the backlog of DI
applicants. Before you suggest hiring more judges, let me propose a
simpler fix: if only the truly disabled got DI, if the fakes were turned
away, the lines of people applying would be shorter. Our friend with
the cowboy hat is involved in DI law because it’s a gold mine. It
shouldn’t be. It was designed for the disabled, not for lawyers and
shady doctors.
Of course, if there is a move to institute such changes, there will be
an outcry. The Michael Hiltziks will accuse reformers of hating the
disabled, and the public will be swayed. Or will it be? We may be
reaching a point where the taxpayer is sick and tired of being ripped
off—and the majority of Americans are appalled when our government
offers citizens inducements to give up on work and cheat through an
ill-supervised program that ends up helping lawyers and doctors, rather
than the disabled.
- See more at: http://www.iwf.org/news/2792288/Our-Severely-Disabled-Disability-System#sthash.pHPSXJGb.dpuf

Our Severely Disabled Disability System

Charlotte Hays

One of the questions I pose in my forthcoming book When Did White Trash Become the New Normal? is this: Should I limp when I’m at the disability office?
At the risk of sounding flip about something with deeply serious
implications for our nation, I must say that Senator Tom Coburn’s
investigation of fraud and abuse in the Social Security Administration's
Disability program definitively answers my question: Don’t bother. Just
find the right lawyer.
That’s no problem as disability lawyers advertise constantly on TV. My
own personal favorite is Charles Binder, the guy with the cowboy hat and
the soothing sign-off: “We'll deal with the government. You have enough to worry about.”
Being disabled is often not the chief worry of DI applicants.
There is something particularly despicable about anybody who would game
the Social Security disability system, imperiling the program for
people who are genuinely in need of such assistance. But countless
people are doing just that. Heather Mac Donald—the Manhattan Institute’s
Cassandra—began sounding the alarm in 1995 with a groundbreaking City Journal article
about an able-bodied and hardworking family, which, alas, put its
impressive energies into obtaining DI payments instead of finding more
meaningful work. Since then, things have only gotten worse.
When it began, the disability insurance (DI) program was small and
inexpensive. Applicants were vetted and the able-bodied turned away. The
number of people on DI in 1960 was around 455,000; by 2011, the number
had skyrocketed to 8,600,000. The budget for DI is $135 billion a year,
topping the costs of the departments of Homeland Security, Justice, and
Labor combined.
Even this figure is misleading: after two years on DI, the recipient is
eligible for Medicare, regardless of age, adding immensely to the
taxpayer’s burden. DI benefits are not lavish, amounting to around
$1,100 a month. This often adds up, however, to lifetime benefits of
around $300,000. Disability lawyers, on the other hand, can pull down
princely sums. Dare I say they make out like bandits?
Senator Coburn's report, jointly released Oct. 7 by the Senate’s
Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committees, and featured last
Sunday on "60 Minutes," shows how legal and medical personnel are
exploiting the system and in the process creating a national disaster.
Government reports can make for pretty dull reading. But this one is a
page turner. Not since the Starr Report, which dealt with shenanigans in
the Clinton White House, have I found myself unable to put down a
government document. And this report is far more important than the
Starr Report, dealing, as it does, with a costly and widespread form of
moral rot.
The star of the report is Eric Conn, who, according to the report, has
built the largest and most lucrative disability practice in the country.
Conn, whose office is in Stanville, Kentucky, on the West Virginia
border, was also the subject of a Wall Street Journal expose. For a
disability lawyer, winning is everything. They only get paid of their
client wins. Then they are paid by the government, which deducts the
fees from what the client receives.
The system has worked well for Conn. “At the height of his success in
2010, Mr. Conn employed nearly 40 people and obtained more than $3.9
million in legal fees from [the Social Security Administration], making
him the agency’s third highest paid disability lawyer that year,” the
Coburn report notes.
It hasn’t hurt that most of Conn’s cases were heard by Administrative
Law Judge David Daugherty, in the SSA’s regional Huntington, West
Virginia Office of Disability Adjudication and Review. In 2010, Judge
Daugherty, who is currently on administrative leave, ruled against only
four of the 1,284 cases he heard. This record is all the more
astonishing when one realizes that these were cases that had previously
been turned down and were on appeal. Daugherty reportedly okayed around
$25 billion in DI benefits in his last years as an administrative law
judge.
No wonder the judge and lawyer reportedly took pains to work together.
According to the Coburn report, "Judge Daugherty telephoned the Conn law
firm each month and identified a list of Mr. Conn’s disability
claimants to whom the judge planned to award benefits. Judge Daugherty
also indicated, for each listed claimant, whether he needed a ‘physical’
or ‘mental’ opinion from a medical professional indicating the claimant
was disabled."
Conn also seems to have had favorite doctors, some of whom have suspect
credentials, including a history of malpractice payouts, but
nevertheless were paid substantial fees to fill out DI forms. According
to the report, a review of records found that over the past six years
Conn paid five doctors almost $2 million for paper work on disability
clients. (He contracted these fees with claimants.)
And the medical work wasn’t that demanding. The Conn firm reportedly
supplied doctors with a set of five different pre-filled out forms for
hundreds of clients. Some doctors met clients at the “medical suite” in
Conn’s law offices. Fifteen minutes was a normal visit. This meant that a
single doctor could see up to 35 claimants in a day. An indication
about how widespread this abuse is: a businessman in my hometown
ruefully told me that there is a local doctor widely known as the go-to
man for DI benefits, even (or especially) if you are in the pink of
health.
Although Coburn made it abundantly clear on “60 Minutes” that he
doesn’t begrudge DI payments to the genuinely disabled, the senator, who
is also a physician, was lambasted for being anti-sick person. “The
news program's theme was that disability recipients are ripping off the
taxpayer,” charged Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times,
a Pulitzer Prize winner, no less, in a story describing the “shameful
attack on the disabled.” Did Mr. Hiltzik really see “60 Minutes?” Coburn
was critical of the non-disabled who, with help from lawyers, doctors, and judges, are ripping off the system.
Coburn acknowledged that many able-bodied DI claimants are desperate
because the economy is so bad that they can’t find work. Nevertheless,
DI wasn’t set up to deal with the outcomes of a bad economy but to help
keep people who truly can’t work. Can DI be saved for those who really
need it? There are some fixes: a healthy skepticism about the cases
claimants present and the presence of a representative of the Social
Security Administration—or better still, a taxpayer’s advocate—at DI
hearings would be a start.
The reason fraud escapes detection, the report indicates, is that
judges face tremendous pressure to get through the backlog of DI
applicants. Before you suggest hiring more judges, let me propose a
simpler fix: if only the truly disabled got DI, if the fakes were turned
away, the lines of people applying would be shorter. Our friend with
the cowboy hat is involved in DI law because it’s a gold mine. It
shouldn’t be. It was designed for the disabled, not for lawyers and
shady doctors.
Of course, if there is a move to institute such changes, there will be
an outcry. The Michael Hiltziks will accuse reformers of hating the
disabled, and the public will be swayed. Or will it be? We may be
reaching a point where the taxpayer is sick and tired of being ripped
off—and the majority of Americans are appalled when our government
offers citizens inducements to give up on work and cheat through an
ill-supervised program that ends up helping lawyers and doctors, rather
than the disabled.
- See more at: http://www.iwf.org/news/2792288/Our-Severely-Disabled-Disability-System#sthash.pHPSXJGb.dpuf

Our Severely Disabled Disability System

Charlotte Hays

One of the questions I pose in my forthcoming book When Did White Trash Become the New Normal? is this: Should I limp when I’m at the disability office?
At the risk of sounding flip about something with deeply serious
implications for our nation, I must say that Senator Tom Coburn’s
investigation of fraud and abuse in the Social Security Administration's
Disability program definitively answers my question: Don’t bother. Just
find the right lawyer.
That’s no problem as disability lawyers advertise constantly on TV. My
own personal favorite is Charles Binder, the guy with the cowboy hat and
the soothing sign-off: “We'll deal with the government. You have enough to worry about.”
Being disabled is often not the chief worry of DI applicants.
There is something particularly despicable about anybody who would game
the Social Security disability system, imperiling the program for
people who are genuinely in need of such assistance. But countless
people are doing just that. Heather Mac Donald—the Manhattan Institute’s
Cassandra—began sounding the alarm in 1995 with a groundbreaking City Journal article
about an able-bodied and hardworking family, which, alas, put its
impressive energies into obtaining DI payments instead of finding more
meaningful work. Since then, things have only gotten worse.
When it began, the disability insurance (DI) program was small and
inexpensive. Applicants were vetted and the able-bodied turned away. The
number of people on DI in 1960 was around 455,000; by 2011, the number
had skyrocketed to 8,600,000. The budget for DI is $135 billion a year,
topping the costs of the departments of Homeland Security, Justice, and
Labor combined.
Even this figure is misleading: after two years on DI, the recipient is
eligible for Medicare, regardless of age, adding immensely to the
taxpayer’s burden. DI benefits are not lavish, amounting to around
$1,100 a month. This often adds up, however, to lifetime benefits of
around $300,000. Disability lawyers, on the other hand, can pull down
princely sums. Dare I say they make out like bandits?
Senator Coburn's report, jointly released Oct. 7 by the Senate’s
Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committees, and featured last
Sunday on "60 Minutes," shows how legal and medical personnel are
exploiting the system and in the process creating a national disaster.
Government reports can make for pretty dull reading. But this one is a
page turner. Not since the Starr Report, which dealt with shenanigans in
the Clinton White House, have I found myself unable to put down a
government document. And this report is far more important than the
Starr Report, dealing, as it does, with a costly and widespread form of
moral rot.
The star of the report is Eric Conn, who, according to the report, has
built the largest and most lucrative disability practice in the country.
Conn, whose office is in Stanville, Kentucky, on the West Virginia
border, was also the subject of a Wall Street Journal expose. For a
disability lawyer, winning is everything. They only get paid of their
client wins. Then they are paid by the government, which deducts the
fees from what the client receives.
The system has worked well for Conn. “At the height of his success in
2010, Mr. Conn employed nearly 40 people and obtained more than $3.9
million in legal fees from [the Social Security Administration], making
him the agency’s third highest paid disability lawyer that year,” the
Coburn report notes.
It hasn’t hurt that most of Conn’s cases were heard by Administrative
Law Judge David Daugherty, in the SSA’s regional Huntington, West
Virginia Office of Disability Adjudication and Review. In 2010, Judge
Daugherty, who is currently on administrative leave, ruled against only
four of the 1,284 cases he heard. This record is all the more
astonishing when one realizes that these were cases that had previously
been turned down and were on appeal. Daugherty reportedly okayed around
$25 billion in DI benefits in his last years as an administrative law
judge.
No wonder the judge and lawyer reportedly took pains to work together.
According to the Coburn report, "Judge Daugherty telephoned the Conn law
firm each month and identified a list of Mr. Conn’s disability
claimants to whom the judge planned to award benefits. Judge Daugherty
also indicated, for each listed claimant, whether he needed a ‘physical’
or ‘mental’ opinion from a medical professional indicating the claimant
was disabled."
Conn also seems to have had favorite doctors, some of whom have suspect
credentials, including a history of malpractice payouts, but
nevertheless were paid substantial fees to fill out DI forms. According
to the report, a review of records found that over the past six years
Conn paid five doctors almost $2 million for paper work on disability
clients. (He contracted these fees with claimants.)
And the medical work wasn’t that demanding. The Conn firm reportedly
supplied doctors with a set of five different pre-filled out forms for
hundreds of clients. Some doctors met clients at the “medical suite” in
Conn’s law offices. Fifteen minutes was a normal visit. This meant that a
single doctor could see up to 35 claimants in a day. An indication
about how widespread this abuse is: a businessman in my hometown
ruefully told me that there is a local doctor widely known as the go-to
man for DI benefits, even (or especially) if you are in the pink of
health.
Although Coburn made it abundantly clear on “60 Minutes” that he
doesn’t begrudge DI payments to the genuinely disabled, the senator, who
is also a physician, was lambasted for being anti-sick person. “The
news program's theme was that disability recipients are ripping off the
taxpayer,” charged Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times,
a Pulitzer Prize winner, no less, in a story describing the “shameful
attack on the disabled.” Did Mr. Hiltzik really see “60 Minutes?” Coburn
was critical of the non-disabled who, with help from lawyers, doctors, and judges, are ripping off the system.
Coburn acknowledged that many able-bodied DI claimants are desperate
because the economy is so bad that they can’t find work. Nevertheless,
DI wasn’t set up to deal with the outcomes of a bad economy but to help
keep people who truly can’t work. Can DI be saved for those who really
need it? There are some fixes: a healthy skepticism about the cases
claimants present and the presence of a representative of the Social
Security Administration—or better still, a taxpayer’s advocate—at DI
hearings would be a start.
The reason fraud escapes detection, the report indicates, is that
judges face tremendous pressure to get through the backlog of DI
applicants. Before you suggest hiring more judges, let me propose a
simpler fix: if only the truly disabled got DI, if the fakes were turned
away, the lines of people applying would be shorter. Our friend with
the cowboy hat is involved in DI law because it’s a gold mine. It
shouldn’t be. It was designed for the disabled, not for lawyers and
shady doctors.
Of course, if there is a move to institute such changes, there will be
an outcry. The Michael Hiltziks will accuse reformers of hating the
disabled, and the public will be swayed. Or will it be? We may be
reaching a point where the taxpayer is sick and tired of being ripped
off—and the majority of Americans are appalled when our government
offers citizens inducements to give up on work and cheat through an
ill-supervised program that ends up helping lawyers and doctors, rather
than the disabled.
- See more at: http://www.iwf.org/news/2792288/Our-Severely-Disabled-Disability-System#sthash.pHPSXJGb.dpuf

About Me

I am a thoroughly civilized, humane, cosmopolitan, polished, restrained, enjoyable, entertaining Info-maniac. I am a staunch exponent of individual dignity, freedom, equal access to legal services, and equal protection of the law. Here I hope to demonstrate my emotional restraint, humbleness of sentiment, psychological subtlety, lucid style, and simple language, without evading political reality or eternal truth. Daily I am excited that I have the right to create the beginning of a new self and to challenge old habits and attitudes I no longer choose to accept. I choose to relax in the present with my direction firmly in mind. I have an enormous capacity for creative and clever ideas and thoughts. It is phenomenal what I can do. I am capable of so much learning and absorbing a lot of information. My potential is a source of pleasant surprise for me.
Each day, I increase in knowledge, skills, strength, faith, and abilities.With each adventure, the boundary hemming in my potential expands easily to accomodate my growth and achievements.